From the mountains which made the great Franz Klammer soar, a new young flier, Matthias Mayer, emerged from obscurity here to tame the Winter Games’ longest and most demanding course and to maintain Austria’s grand tradition of unlikely Olympic downhill champions.

Bode Miller had suggested it was a course so treacherously forbidding that “it could kill” but on the day, mercifully, the only thing that died was the daredevil’s American dream of crowning his career with victory in winter sport’s blue riband event.

Before the 36-year-old Miller was left despondent with his eighth place, young Mayer, some 13 years his junior, effectively sped from nowhere, hitting speeds of almost 84mph as he sailed off the big jumps, to go one better than his father Helmut, a former Olympic silver medallist.

Mayer had never won a World Cup race, nor finished better than fifth in any major downhill. Austria knew the lad from the southern Alpine province of Carinthia, which had produced 1976 champion Klammer and 2002 winner Fritz Strobl, was promising but error-prone in big races.

“He would be super-fast in training but then always do something stupid in races because he’s so young,” mused the Austrian national coach Mathias Berthold. “Look what happened when he was finally able to put it together.”

What happened was that the ‘stupid boy’ can help Berthold sleep easily with his superlative assault on a course which, at a length of 2.1 miles and with its fiercely fast and hard rutted sections, proved a rare test of stamina as well as nerve.

Mayer felt fate was at work. His mum had told him so and he seemed preternaturally calm, remembering this course on a previous visit to Sochi. “I woke up this morning and knew I could win. I was smiling the whole day, all throughout the inspection. It was my day today,” he said, still grinning hours later.

After watching the lead change four times, Mayer, who had decided not to finish the previous day’s final training run to save his energy, careered down in 2 min 06.23 sec, pushing right to the edge in the middle sections and over the feared Bear’s Brow jump.

Then he gazed back up the mountain, expecting sentimental favourite Miller, who was 0.66 sec quicker than anyone in final training, to be among those beating his time. Instead, Miller, who had ripped through the first two sections 0.31 sec ahead, clipped a gate on a right-hand turn and his advantage began to haemorrhage.

Over half a second slower than Mayer, he appeared the picture of desolation at the end, slumping down on to his skis with his hands clamped forlornly around his racing helmet.

For two of the three days of practice, Miller had been untouchably good beneath sunny blue skies, roaring his pleasure that his old scarred wounded knee was thriving in this ultimate challenge, but when he looked for more lovely weather, he reckoned nature betrayed him with clouds worsening the visibility as the race progressed.

“It made it really hard. And the middle and bottom of the course slowed so much between the beginning of the race and my start that I thought, ‘You’ll have to do something magical to win’,” he reflected. “I didn’t really make any mistakes and I lost a ton of time. In ski racing 20 minutes of time makes a massive difference to snow conditions.”

Yet Mayer had set out only eight minutes earlier than him.

There were no excuses; when Christof Innerhofer, Italy’s first ever men’s downhill medallist, just failed to beat his time by just six hundredths of a second, the youngster started to believe the unbelievable.

“A dream come true,” he spluttered. Helmut Mayer had won silver in the Super-G in Calgary in 1988 and also a world silver but this was even more wonderful, a result as unexpected as the triumphs of his compatriots Leonhard Stock in Lake Placid, Patrick Ortlieb in Albertville and, to a lesser extent, Strobl in Salt Lake City.

Yet Mayer’s real inspiration was an Austrian who famously failed to win the biggest skiing prize of all, Hermann ‘The Herminator’ Maier, who picked himself up out of the snow like an indestructible Yeti in Nagano and recovered to win the Super-G a couple of days later.

“I was with my grandad and we set an alarm in the middle of the night to watch,” Mayer recalled. “That was impressive to me. It made me want to be a downhiller even more.”

Mayer had shown that sort of spirit of his own when two years ago he needed surgery on his ankle and contracted reactive arthritis, losing 15kg through resulting fever and inflammations and not being able to train for nine months.

Now he is making up for lost time. And how. The Olympic downhill title has had its unfair share of one-hit wonders but one fancies that with the Super-G to come next Sunday, Mayer, the man who smiles that he has “Olympic blood”, will not be among them.